Darkness Calls
by audreyrosewadsworth
Summary: Cass Baratheon can absolutely believe her younger, illegitimate brother (who is also her king), would send her away to train with, of all things, the Jedi. The only problems: the growing unrest in the galaxy, being barred from her home while news of the deaths of her closest friends and family is delivered weekly, and the ever annoying, whiny, Anakin Skywalker.


Prologue

" _F-E-A-R has two meanings: Forget everything and run, or face everything and rise. The choice is yours."_

 _-Unknown_

Cass could absolutely believe that her brother had shipped her off the moment he was presented with the opportunity. He had never liked her, and she him, for obvious reasons. Cass was, or had been, their father's favorite of his four legitimate children. Joffrey was her mother's favorite of the four children that she had brought into the world.

When Cass was younger, she used to waste her energy, her time, trying to come up with a reasonable answer for why her mother despised her. And, no, despise was not too harsh of a word. In fact, it was a quite generous word to sum up her mother's feelings toward her eldest daughter. Despite all of her consideration, all of her reasonable intelligence, she could come up with nothing other than an answer that was completely unacceptable, an answer of which she always pushed away when the conclusion got itself lodged in her brain once again.

On a normal day, if she had come to this conclusion as she had today, the only way to banish it from her brain would be to go riding. Alas, that was not really available to her at the moment. And so, the idea was left to fester. To grow, and plant more seeds to replace the already harvested ones.

How was she supposed to handle the heavy grip of a lightsaber? She, a girl. Well, now a woman, but her brother would never acknowledge this fact. It would mean that she was older than he, and that was just not acceptable.

Back to the problem at hand. Actually, what the real problem was. The problem that she wished not to acknowledge, but was there anyway. Growing in the deepest depths of her mind. Not that she would probably embarrass herself attempting to lift a lightsaber. No, this was the least of her worries. If she was embarrassed, well, it was nothing new. She could handle embarrassment. What she could not handle, though, was what she knew would absolutely happen now that she was gone. Now that her father was gone. Now that her uncle was gone. Now, there would be no checks for Joffrey. He was free to do whatever he wished to their younger siblings. She had been the only thing keeping him in line for so long, and now she was gone.

There was a great shake, as the spacecraft she was in presumably attempted to make a landing. She had expected to be frightened, scared out of her wits, as her brother had surely anticipated when he had agreed to ship her here. An easy way to get rid of her, while still causing her great harm, pushing her into situations with nothing familiar. Telling her people that she had abandoned them. That the power had finally seized her. It had become too much, he would say in his decree, all the rumors spoke true.

As the man seated closest to her, no, not a man, a thin thing, with a blocky head, that only wore a man's clothes, she reminded herself. It reached out to her, as if to assist her out of the craft. Though she did not wish to touch it, she was reminded how the courtiers from her own home took so much offense to one not taking a proffered hand. A slight, her uncle had once whispered to her, so long ago. She had been so young then, and she had now learned that even the smallest slight could be a means to spark a war.

And so she took the thing's proffered hand, and he assisted her out of the spacecraft, and into an entirely new world.

As the group of humanoid, men-like things escorted her into the gigantic, white building, a feeling of anticipation overtook any of the fear she may have felt.

She was going to learn to use this…this sword-like weapon. A lightsaber, the man who had taken her aside after he had met with her brother had informed her. Women wielded them as well, he went on, and anyone who showed the signs of the power she had was welcomed with open arms to train to use this power to do good things, things that would help the world, things that would revolutionize the galaxy.

She knew that she should not feel the excitement that she did. The excitement that going away from all of her family, all of her responsibilities, and all of her troubles had brought her. Yet she did. A chance for an adventure, for a real life, before her hand was sold for some alliance. Some alliance that was no doubt to help her people, her kingdom, her family. And she should be happy that she was blessed with the chance to better her family, her septa would say. After that, she had stopped asking questions, and begun to do what was asked of her. Learn to do all of the kingdoms' traditional dances, take etiquette lessons, and only speak when first spoken to, like a proper lady of her rank. And so she had. She had become the kind of lady that her father bragged about, the kind of lady that her grandfather had attempted to sculpt her mother into.

Cass knew that all of these skills, every single skill that she had learned these past seventeen years would be invaluable to her survival.

Too soon her escorts reached a humongous set of grand doors. She mused that they would have reminded her of home if everything were not so bare, so…white.

One of the humanoids knocked once, using his human-replicated knuckles. Whatever was on the other side of the doors seemed to pause, as if deep in thought.

"Enter, you may," a slightly high-pitched voice replied after some time.

Not a woman, Cass could tell. A young boy then? No, he sounded nothing like any of her brothers had when they were younger.

Just as the humanoid creature opened the door, a feeling of immense power struck her. Many signatures, every single person in this room knowing exactly who she was, and exactly what she was sensing from all of them. Not all people, she noted as the humanoids moved to escort her into the large space in the middle of the white room lined with large windows.

At least half of the people present were something like what she had pictured in the myths and tall tales that her septa had recited to her before bedtime for years. These things had always been the ones that attempted, or did, eat and hunt the young children of the stories for sport. The thought did nothing to soothe the growing sense of panic seizing control of every single inch of her body. What would they do to her if she disappointed? If she did not live up to expectations?

"Sense your fear, I do," the same voice that had called for them to enter began. The slightly high-pitched voice from earlier belonged to a small creature seated in one of the flying chairs before her.

"Worry, you should not," he went on. "Here to help you, we are." A nod from every one of the beings present.

"Learn to control it, you must," he finished.

Cass gathered her fear, and locked it away in an iron box, tossing the key into the dangerous waters of the Narrow Sea, never to be heard from again. And then, she threw the box into the never ending galaxy, and wished her brain good luck finding it again.

"Thank you," she said.


End file.
